The Long Obedience

A sermon preached at All Hallows by Jan Betts on 8 June 2008
(3rd Sunday after Trinity)

• Audio (listen to this sermon online)

Readings:

Genesis 12:1—9, Romans 4:13—25, Matthew 9:9—13, 18—26

In the name of God, Life-giver, Pain-bearer, Love-maker. Amen.

In terms of the Church’s year, at the moment we are in what is called ‘ordinary time’. In the last few months we have had Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter and Pentecost. A lot has been happening. Now we sit in ordinary time until next Advent, without major celebration or anything to distract us from just getting on with life, except maybe a summer break somewhere.

Ordinariness isn’t a very exciting quality in some ways; mathematically, ordinal numbers are just counting up, first, second, third, and so on, just plodding up the numbers. It’s ticking off the days on our calendars. In my case it often feels like it’s in church meetings — once I’ve got to four in a week I figure it must be somewhere near Friday!!

In my reading for this sermon I came across the phrase ‘the long obedience’, and I liked that. So today in the readings we look at the long obedience to their call of two ordinary people in the Bible and two others. We also look at how that obedience, that faith, transforms the ordinary into the extra-ordinary, because of the way it moves us into partnership with God.

Abram was called by God to travel to Canaan. ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to a place I shall show you’, says God. And Abram does. Why? Why does he do that? God goes on: ‘And I will bless you and make of you a great nation’. Well, becoming a great nation could be a pretty good reason for heading out of Haran and bizarrely abandoning all he knows, but it isn’t just for reward that Abram sets off. He does it, as Paul reminds us in Romans, because he has faith. Because he believes that living according to the law of honouring God is what he is called to do. Abram’s understanding of how the world is, is that what we are here to do is to look with God’s eyes, and live in God’s understanding. This may run totally counter to common sense. It may lead into real trouble and heartache, which it certainly did for him, but it also led to God. Haran may look comfortable, but the lens, the framework, through which Abram sees the world, gave a different picture. If God said Haran wasn’t for him, Abram would shift, because he believed God.

So he sets off on a long journey, a big loop south to Canaan, and God only speaks to him once in that time that we are told about. Abram just does the long obedience with only occasional moments when God appears to him to keep him travelling. But he knows that this is where God wants him to be, and he talks with God along the way. In the end God does make of him a great nation, which is why we are still reading about him.

Matthew, who also features in the readings today, was sitting in his work place when Jesus came to him. Maybe Matthew had heard of Jesus, or met him, maybe Jesus sensed something in Matthew, some of the humanity which comes through in the gospel with his name on it, and called him. We don’t know if Matthew then did the equivalent of locking his office door and walking out at lunchtime never to return, or whether he carefully packed up, handed things over in good order, told his family what was going on and joined Jesus as soon as he could. But we do know that he joined up to something he couldn’t predict. It was going to be different, but once he had heard Jesus say ‘follow me’ he couldn’t say that the world was the same. He too now had Jesus’ lenses on: the world had changed, had a different focus. The story of Matthew’s call, and presumably Matthew knew something of this, comes in the middle of a collection of reported events which has at their heart the great news that Jesus comes for sinners, not the righteous. And this is illustrated in the way Jesus in these stories is open to defilement, as understood in his time, in all sorts of ways: being touched by women, and by a woman who was bleeding, touching a dead body, eating with tax collectors and ‘sinners’, calling a man seated at the place of custom as his disciple. ‘You too, Matthew, are one of those sinners for whom I have come’. The message to Matthew is that he has to follow in a way which will overturn his accepted ideas, which will mean he has to constantly re-interpret what is good, what is right, what will make him happy apart from money. There will also be for him a long obedience where Jesus will die, where Matthew will be left to ponder on the meaning of what has happened. We read that interpretation, or something close to it, today.

Now none of this is really news to us. But both of these people were ordinary people in many ways, and what we see in these two lives is something of the partnership with which God honours us. One of our prayers begins ‘ Lord, you have no body now on earth but ours’, and God calls us to work with her in the bringing in of a kingdom which runs, not in parallel with the kingdoms which we know, but often at right angles to them in terms of values. Often, if we are honest, being a Christian can look pretty barking to many people, even to ourselves, but we work with God and in God’s framework.

This is the key, I think, to our long obedience. It is hard — but God calls us to have his eyes of love and compassion for those who are considered defiled or defiling, sinful, outside the nice circles. What we have to ask about any action is, if I do this, is it something which is part of the radical call to love which we have in the New Testament?

Testing out our calling is something we still have to do today. It may be a long obedience about just steadily going on in the place where we live or work and doing things in a way which is conscientious, done to the glory of God. Brother Lawrence famously did this in a kitchen in medieval times, and we hear about in his lovely book The practice of the presence of God. If you haven’t read it, look it up on the web. One quote gives a flavour: ‘The most excellent method of going to God is that of doing our common business ... purely for the love of God.’ He worked in his kitchen, and in the sandal repair shop, in a long obedience doing his common business.

I thought it would be good to hear about one call which we have in our own church which isn’t quite common business. We are all asked to walk our own roads, and all calls aren’t about things to do with church, but all calls are about sharing the good news in some way. There are so many examples here in All Hallows and one is just an illustration.

[Here Alison spoke for about 3 minutes on the idea of obedience in calling, around having God in her home.]

And lastly I want to mention Pat. I feel humbly unable to say very much at all about Pat. Many of you knew her so well and I only met her a few times. There will be a time and a place to celebrate fully all she did, and it will be a great celebration. But she has been in my head and heart and prayers as an incredible illustration as I prepared this. I do know, from all that I have heard and seen, that this ordinary woman, who had so many difficulties to fight against in her own life, responded to God’s call from exactly where she was, because she had a different vision, a vision which ran counter to the careful language and the polite conventions she often bumped up against. She did, in her own extraordinary way, the long and difficult obedience to the spirit of love and the radical countering of violence at the heart of the Kingdom of God. We are so much poorer for her loss and so much richer for her wonderful example.

Amen.

Copyright © 2008 Jan Betts

Audio

This sermon was recorded. If you wish, you can listen to the sermon online. Just click on the appropriate link below:

*Notes on the audio formats

• MP4 format
  MP4 format is a multimedia container format standard. Audio MP4 files can combine high compression with very high quality. Many media players can play MP4 files, including RealPlayer, QuickTime, iTunes, and recent versions of Windows Media Player (you may need to download a codec from www.free-codecs.com/download/3ivx.htm).
• Windows Media Player format
  Windows Media Player is installed as part of Windows. If you have an earlier version, you can download version 9 (for Windows 98SE, Millennium and 2000) or version 10 or later (for Windows XP and Vista) from www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?categoryid=4. These are quite large downloads [~ 10 MB or larger], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
• RealAudio format
  This requires RealPlayer (or the older RealOne Player) to be installed. A free version of RealPlayer can be downloaded from http://uk.real.com/player/ (choose the free player on the left of the page) — but again it’s a large download [~ 13 MB], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
  
  Alternatively, you can install Real Alternative, which will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer/RealOne Player. Real Alternative is free, and works well with all major browsers; it is also a much smaller download (5.7 MB). Get it from http://www.free-codecs.com/Real_Alternative_download.htm.

This page was last updated on Sunday, 27 April 2008

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